It's becoming increasingly clear that gamers are playing on smartphones more and more and that these players are doing so to the detriment of traditional handhelds. One of the leading publishers on smartphones, ngmoco (now owned by Japan's DeNA), doesn't see a very bright future for the traditional portables. During a GDC interview, ngmoco boss Neil Young expressed his concerns about NGP and 3DS to IndustryGamers.
“I think they are hurt; I think they're clearly hurt,” Young said of the traditional portables from Sony and Nintendo. “I think PSP is done and the new [NGP] is dead on arrival. It's really difficult to compete with an app store that has hundreds of thousands of applications and a wide range of options where the average price paid is around $1.20 and there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of free applications that are really high quality. So I just don't think Sony's going to be able to compete with that.”
We played devil's advocate and noted that Sony would counter with the idea that NGP can provide a PS3-like experience, but Young wasn't buying it and he said horsepower isn't the key to success anyway.
“It's not a PS3 quality experience... And in terms of getting broad adoption, having great processing power is not necessarily a prerequisite for great adoption in the marketplace. You need a range of things and what I think the iPod Touch and iPhone have been able to do is offer people swiss army knife type functionality for a device that plays games really well. It's not like it's crap at playing games – it's pretty good at playing games and it can do a whole bunch of other things as well."
As for Nintendo, Young paints a better picture, simply because of Nintendo's always popular IP. "I think Nintendo will likely be competitive. My personal opinion is that the 3D piece of the puzzle is kind of gimmicky. But Nintendo has great franchises and there are tens of millions of people who want to participate in those franchises, so that always helps... But the real question is the degree to which there's a third-party community," he said.
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A bit doom and gloom surely? It's a bit early to write off the NGP yet, because we know very little about it, and reports show that the 3D in the 3DS is very impressive.
However, claiming that smartphones are the future by anyone shows that they are clearly misinformed. Sure, the Iphone may have a few good games on them, but I don't see it overtaking, or replacing, handheld gaming anytime soon.
What do you reckon?
